1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of clustered computer systems and, more particularly, to deploying applications on clustered computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
As web-based applications become more important to business and industry, system failure becomes more expensive, and highly reliable systems assume a greater importance. For example, a web site may handle financial, production, sales, marketing or media applications. Failure to provide these applications to clients for even a few minutes could mean thousands or millions of dollars in lost income.
One way to provide applications on a highly reliable basis is a distributed system with a plurality of redundant components. In a distributed system, a plurality of servers may be connected by a load balancer and a network. In some embodiments, servers may be grouped into one or more clusters of servers. Each cluster may be operable to execute an instance, or copy, of the same application on one or more servers. The load balancer may be operable to serve requests to each instance of the application so that each server has approximately the same overall workload.
One or more servers may execute on a single computer system, or node, in a distributed system. Furthermore, different nodes in a distributed system may be of different architectures. For example, a cluster may be comprised of both Solaris and Linux nodes. In addition, different servers executing on the same node may be part of different clusters.
Traditional management of configuration for software, hardware, and server clustering may rely on repeated manual operations, each of which may or may not require subtle changes. For example, each instance of an application on a cluster may need to be individually compiled, deployed and verified for each server, although each application instances may be substantially similar. In one example, a minor change made between the compilation of different instances may make a major differences between the instances themselves, thereby breaking compatibility between instances.
In addition, small changes may need to be made between different hardware or software deployments. For example, two instances of an application executing on two different servers which in turn execute on the same node may not be able to share the same network port parameter. In a large distributed system the network port parameters in hundreds of configuration files may need to be manually changed. However, manually accessing and modifying hundreds of configuration files may prove both time-consuming and error-prone.